As promised, following The Concept and Essence of Strategic Marketing, today I’m gonna describe the first step of the strategic marketing – the mission and the goals.
The mission of the company is usually described as the public purpose of the organization. The mission, in the first place, is the answer to the question of what the company’s activities are and what it plans to do.
The formation of the mission lays the main content and activities and allows you to position the company giving it its own distinctive features. The mission is the path of development of the enterprise.
When defining the company’s mission, it is necessary to answer several important questions:
- What needs will be addressed by the company’s activities?
- What technologies will be used in the company?
- Who will become a consumer of the company’s products or services?
- What is the quality level of the products/services to be produced?
- What price category they will belong to?
- What are the company’s core values?
Answering all the questions above you should come to an understanding of your company’s mission. Formation of the mission is one of the most difficult tasks for any business in any industry. In the course of solving the problem, it is worth considering the influence of the following five factors:
- company history
- the vision of business owners
- market environment
- existing and potential company resources
- the ability of key persons of the company to conduct business
The mission should be as close as possible to the market on which the company is located, and be based only on what the company can do in the best possible way. The mission must be realistic and absolutely accurately take into account the wishes of those who determine the future of the company.
As a rule, missions have three main characteristics:
- defining a limited number of targets;
- determination of the main directions of development of the company;
- definition of the field of competition
Usually, the company develops the mission when it enters the market. However, many companies form their missions having worked on the market for more than five or even ten years.
After you formed the mission, you have to determine the goals of the company.
The goals of the company are the short-term and long-term results that the management of the organization wants to achieve. Setting clear and unambiguous goals contributes to the development of an effective company strategy, and also allows you to break down the organization’s mission into certain steps and actions.
Goals are the management commitments to achieve specific results within a given time frame. They are usually formed by decomposing a mission into its component goals.
There are disputes about what a mission is, and what the goals of the company are. The main differences are as follows:
- The mission is not limited by time. Goals always have clear time limits.
- The mission aims at the external environment for the organization. Goals often relate to the internal environment of the company. They are expressed in the use of the resources available to the organization to achieve the targets.
- The mission is relative. Goals are determined based on their reachability.
- Mission and goals can be measurable, but in the case of a mission, measurability is only qualitative, and the goals, on the contrary, are quantitative
When developing the mission and goals of the organization in most cases, the following two approaches are used:
- study and analysis of internal regulatory documents
- interviewing the management of the company
You can use both approaches at once since they make it possible to form a full-fledged mission and a tree of goals.
Right after you complete your mission and goals, you have to go to the next step of strategic marketing, which I will share with you in my next post.
